First performances unveiled for Dance International Glasgow 2025
Tramway has unveiled the first events for Dance International Glasgow (DIG) 2025, as the festival returns to the city this spring.
Curated and produced by Tramway, DIG returns to the arts centre and site-specific spaces across Glasgow from 9 - 24 May. Featuring live performance from international names alongside homegrown and local talent, the full Dance International Glasgow lineup will be unveiled in March and will include main stage spectaculars, screenings, outdoor events, workshops and a family programme, bringing the best of contemporary dance to audiences of all ages across the city.
The first of the performances to be announced is a new work by disabled choreographer and singer Claire Cunningham. Songs of the Wayfarer will be performed at Tramway on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 May 2025.
The production sees Cunningham traverse nature, stage and Gustav Mahler’s song cycle to navigate both known and unfamiliar landscapes. Led by her lived experience as a disabled person, Songs of the Wayfarer is inspired by Cunningham’s memory of training as a classical singer, knowledge drawn from the world of mountaineering, and Gustav Mahler’s ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.’ Through a ‘crip lens’ - Claire explains this word is a political and cultural identity embraced by some disabled individuals – she invites us to pay closer attention to the ways we navigate the physical world, alongside profound loss and change in our lives.
This new solo work asks - what is it to wander and to seek to scale great heights? It asks what it means to keep going and, importantly, have the wisdom to know when to turn back.
The second performance announced is by Scottish/German choreographer Colette Sadler. Named after a line from the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, which describes the sunset sky over London, The Violet Hour (Wednesday 21 May) intertwines real and digital realities in a piece featuring dance, song and digital video.
The Violet Hour asks if new figures and narratives can be found that stand in opposition to humanity’s self-destructive drive and the natural disasters that result from this. The piece proposes a surreal exploration of the relationship between humans and our surroundings, stretching the notion of how we are influenced by and implicated in the changing ecologies around us.
In a time when our relationship with the natural world is urgently shifting in ungraspable ways, The Violet Hour is an attempt to offer a potential future toward a more sensually entangled interdependence with the natural world.
Both shows are on sale now, and the full DIG 2025 programme will be announced and available to book on 19 March.
For more information on Claire Cunningham visit: clairecunningham.co.uk and for further details on Colette Sadler’s work please go to colettesadler.com
